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30 Days of Music: Day 1
Jan. 12th, 2011 09:34 pmFavorite Song
This changes a lot, depending on the day, month, week or year or sometimes even the hour. One song I keep coming back to again and again, though, is Hüsker Dü's cover of "Eight Miles High." Every now and then a band or a performer takes someone else's song and blows it so far out of the water that you almost never think of the orignal again. Hendrix' take on "All Along the Watchtower" is one. So is Rod Stewart's "Downtown Train. No, I jest. Really. That cover is so bad it almost never makes me want to hear the original again. Anyway, this is one of those covers. There's the ferocity of the drums that pummel the backbeat, the guitar that shreds apart the ether with its intensity, the screaming glory of the vocals that makes you wonder if you may have witnessed the exploding birth of the cosmos, and the bass that anchors the entire thing to earth to keep you and the song from being flung off into infinity. It appeared as a single in 1984, as a precursor to Zen Arcade that would come out soon after, and it helped change the sound of every guitar band that came after. It's heaven encapsulated in three minutes and fifty-six seconds of pure sonic bliss.
This changes a lot, depending on the day, month, week or year or sometimes even the hour. One song I keep coming back to again and again, though, is Hüsker Dü's cover of "Eight Miles High." Every now and then a band or a performer takes someone else's song and blows it so far out of the water that you almost never think of the orignal again. Hendrix' take on "All Along the Watchtower" is one. So is Rod Stewart's "Downtown Train. No, I jest. Really. That cover is so bad it almost never makes me want to hear the original again. Anyway, this is one of those covers. There's the ferocity of the drums that pummel the backbeat, the guitar that shreds apart the ether with its intensity, the screaming glory of the vocals that makes you wonder if you may have witnessed the exploding birth of the cosmos, and the bass that anchors the entire thing to earth to keep you and the song from being flung off into infinity. It appeared as a single in 1984, as a precursor to Zen Arcade that would come out soon after, and it helped change the sound of every guitar band that came after. It's heaven encapsulated in three minutes and fifty-six seconds of pure sonic bliss.
